Ancient Texts Part of Earliest Known Documents

Discovery News ^ | December 27, 2011 | Rossella Lorenzi

[Engraved-on-His-hands]

A team of scholars has discovered what might be the oldest representation of the Tower of Babel of Biblical fame, they report in a newly published book.

Carved on a black stone, which has already been dubbed the Tower of Babel stele, the inscription dates to 604-562 BCE.

It was found in the collection of Martin Schøyen, a businessman from Norway who owns the largest private manuscript assemblage formed in the 20th century.

Consisting of 13,717 manuscript items spanning over‭ ‬5,000‭ ‬years, the collection includes parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Buddhist manuscript rescued from the Taliban, and even cylcon symbols by Australia's Aborigines which can be up to 20,000 years old.

The collection also includes a large number of pictographic and cuneiform tablets -- which are some of the earliest known written documents -- seals and royal inscription spanning most of the written history of Mesopotamia, an area near modern Iraq.

[PetroniusMaximus]

ping

[SunkenCiv]

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Thanks Red Badger for the ping, and thanks Engraved-on-His-hands for posting the topic and the elucidation. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Condor51]

*** And then there is this.....The Burj Khalifa........ tallest in the world ***

Oh-oh.

'The tower's architecture and engineering were performed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill of Chicago'

and that's all I'm sayin' on that.

[Principled]

So if it’s supposed to be a triangular [or rectangular] pyramid, how much more rock is needed at the base and each successive row in order to make the pyramid one stone taller - while keeping the optimal ratios?

That’s a pretty good math problem! Answers vary and can probably be written as a cubic or quartic function ;)

[Jonty30]

It is a great math problem, because not only are you having to figure out the size of the base, as it relates to height, you are also having to take into account the weight of the rock and how much it can support before it fails as a foundation.

[Principled]

Yes, engineering and physics were invented just for this reason - to create great math problems

[Siena Dreaming]

I always interpreted the era of Peleg as the time the earth literally divided...that is, the earth was separated into the continents we have today, not necessarily the time at which the split of languages occurred.

[Verginius Rufus]

Babel and Babylon seem to be just the Hebrew and Greek versions of the same name, Babillum in the Babylonian language.

In Genesis 11.9 where the KJV has the word Babel, the Septuagint text has Synchysis which means "confusion."

Babylon appears to be a very ancient site, but it was an insignificant place until the time of King Hammurabi in the 18th century B.C. The main Assyrian cities were further north near modern Mosul--there were periods when the Assyrians dominated all of Mesopotamia, but these were later than the time period the Bible envisions for the building of the Tower of Babel.

The Babylonian Empire of the time of Nebuchadnezzar is sometimes called the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean Empire--they don't seem to be directly descended from the rulers of the first Babylonian Empire (there was an interval when an alien group, the Kassites, ruled Babylonia for several centuries).